Divide and Conquer: Find Solutions by Splitting Up

Earlier this year, my team wanted to improve the user experience on our company’s website, and this involved creating more code on the client side of the browser. The GUI test tool we’d used for years couldn’t access events on the client side, and we didn’t want to release code that our automated regression tests didn’t support. We decided to use Selenium WebDriver to drive our tests through the browser, since it handled our Javascript code well. We wanted to write our test scripts using the Page Object pattern, but we had a hard time deciding which framework to use. We invested time over several months, during which various team members paired up to spike different frameworks, including a homegrown one. Each proof of concept took a few weeks, but that information was invaluable to finding a framework that was best for our needs. Choosing the right framework meant that we were able to quickly write efficient, easy-to-maintain test scripts.

That’s just one example of how a team can solve any problem with a divide-and-conquer approach. Any obstacle your team identifies in a retrospective is a candidate for having sub-teams dream up individual solutions and propose those solutions to the whole team, and then having the whole team try out the two or three solutions that seem best. You might even decide to try all of the good ideas that come out of your small-group brainstorming sessions!